How to Think More Clearly—and Improve Your Life
By Jon Hersey
On the British sketch comedy show The Two Ronnies, a man walks into a shop and asks the clerk for “fork handles.” When the clerk gets him four candles, the man says, “No, fork handles—handles for forks!”1 When the customer ambiguously asks, “Got any O’s?,” the clerk brings him a hoe. “No, O’s,” says the customer. “Oh, hose!,” says the clerk, and brings him a hose—before the man clarifies that he needs letter O’s for a sign.
We all face the dual challenges of thinking and communicating clearly, which impact all areas of our lives. Whether we’re grappling with new ideas, relaying plans to friends, pitching a start-up to potential investors, or writing the next great American novel, success requires clearly formulating our thoughts and finding ways to get them into the minds of others.
The consequences of failing to do so range from humorous to life altering. It’s just another day when my wife, for whom English is a second language, asks for ChapSticks with her sushi or sings along to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” “Hold me closer, Tony Danza!” On the other end of the spectrum, how many relationships—personal and professional—implode over poor communication?
One relationship website found that 65 percent of the divorces reported in response to its survey were caused by communication problems—making it the leading cause by far.2
WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg takes clear communication seriously. The company’s employees work remotely and rely heavily on e-mail and messaging. Early on, Mullenweg grasped that efficiency depends on clarity. Poor thinkers and communicators vex peers and customers with an endless ping-pong of questions and garbled responses, wasting time, trying patience, and depleting profits. So, anyone applying for a job at WordPress is tested on clarity. Those who can’t communicate clearly, even if they are otherwise highly skilled, are not hired.
Mullenweg’s hiring practices may be exceptional, but we all constantly evaluate and respond to others based on how they communicate, often without consciously realizing it. We think differently about the education of a stranger who asks, “Where ‘dat parking lot?” than we do of another who asks, “Excuse me, could you point me to the closest parking garage?” Likewise, we adjust how we communicate based on with whom we’re speaking and the context of that conversation. Would you speak to the person conducting your next job interview the same way you would to your best friend over a beer?
The ability to think abstractly and communicate those thoughts was the heart of mankind’s cognitive revolution, paving the way for the relationships and collaborations that enabled humans to go from near the bottom of the food chain to the top, from caves to skyscrapers—to the moon and beyond. Clear thought and communication are our most impactful general-purpose skills, and investing in them can greatly improve our lives.
There is a simple standing order that can help you clarify your thinking and communication. I’ve used it for years in my own writing and editing, and it has greatly improved my thinking—and, thus, my life more generally.
Before we get to the principle, let’s look at some of the common roadblocks to communication that led me to adopt it.
Passive Voice
Read the following examples and ask yourself what they have in common:
A decision was made.
Temperatures have been reported to be rising.
The bill was signed into law.
The painting was stolen.
Aside from their banality, all of these share a certain sentence structure. They are examples of passive voice. In passive voice, the grammatical subject of the sentence (“a decision,” “temperatures,” etc.) receives an action. The focus is on the thing acted upon, not the agent taking the action. And often, as in these examples, passive voice leaves unstated who or what that agent is. That’s OK when the person or thing taking the action is unimportant or is not the focus of what we’re trying to communicate. Perhaps it’s unknown who took a particular action; if so, passive voice may be warranted.
In the general course of our lives, however, we deal with people, and we typically know or need to know who took a given action. When we do know, we must evaluate them on the basis of their actions and respond accordingly—or suffer consequences. It’s vital to know that Jim decided, that the IPCC reported that temperatures are rising, that the president signed the bill into law, that Stéphane Breitwieser stole the painting. If we don’t know who did what, we can’t respond appropriately, so it is in our interest to find out.
No one made the issues with passive voice more clear—nor did so with greater humor—than Richard Mitchell, the late, great English and classics professor, more famously known as the Underground Grammarian. Mitchell held that the language we use says a lot about who we are and how we think. To illustrate the point, he told the story of a professor friend of his who decided to become an academic administrator. As he transitioned into the role, “he began to lose the power of his prose.” He used to write Mitchell little notes, such as, “Let’s meet next Monday at two o’clock, OK?” Shortly after he decided to pursue the administrator position, he began writing notes such as, “Please be informed that the Committee on Memorial Plaques will meet on Monday at 2:00.” Mitchell quipped that such afflictions might be caused by a worm in the brain. He wrote:
There you sit, minding your own business and hurting no man. All at once, quite insensibly, the thing creeps into your brain. It might end up in the storage shelves of the subjunctive or the switchboard of the nonrestrictive clauses, of course, but in your case it heads for the cozy nook where the active and passive voices are balanced and adjusted. There it settles in and nibbles a bit here and a bit there. In our present state of knowledge, still dim, we have to guess that the active voice is tastier than the passive, since the destruction of the latter is very rare but of the former all too common.
So there you are with your active verbs being gnawed away. Little by little and only occasionally at first, you start saying things like: “I am told that . . .” and “This letter is being written because . . .” This habit has subtle effects. For one thing, since passives always require more words than actives, anything you may happen to write is longer than it would have been before the attack of the worm. You begin to suspect that you have a lot to say after all and that it’s probably rather important. The suspicion is all the stronger because what you write has begun to sound–well, sort of “official.” “Hmm,” you say to yourself, “Fate may have cast my lot a bit below my proper station,” or, more likely, “Hmm. My lot may have been cast by Fate a bit below my proper station.”
Furthermore, the very way you consider the world, or the very way in which the world is considered by you, is subtly altered. You used to see a world in which birds ate worms and men made decisions. Now it looks more like a world in which worms are eaten by birds and decisions are made by men. It’s almost a world in which victims are put forward as “doers” responsible for whatever may befall them, and actions are almost unrelated to those who perform them. But only almost. The next step is not taken until you learn to see a world in which worms are eaten and decisions made and all responsible agency has disappeared. Now you are ready to be an administrator.3
Throughout his work, Mitchell hilariously points out the moral implications of grammar and communication. It’s not always the case that those who use passive voice are trying to hide the facts, but sometimes it is. So, we should treat passive voice as guilty until proven innocent. In both thinking and writing, opt for active voice whenever possible, which states who or what is acting.
Now, let’s add another wrinkle.
Zombie Nouns
Can you spot what’s wrong with the following?
The necessity to rethink our system in order to correct it is evident.
The lack of foresight and inability to provide clear direction resulted in delays.
Each of these exemplifies the grammatical sin of nominalization. People create nominalizations by turning a verb or other part of speech—sometimes an entire clause—into a noun or noun phrase. In the example above, “the necessity to rethink our system in order to correct it” is one big, fat noun phrase. Likewise for “the lack of foresight and inability to provide clear direction.” Each functions as the grammatical subject of the sentence—the agent, we are told, that is acting.
Although we could classify many sentences containing nominalizations as active (because the subject does an action, it doesn’t receive one), most such sentences are effectively passive because they leave us in the dark about who is actually taking an action. Consider the examples above. Because the first discusses “our system,” the implied actor is a vague “we.” The second example (“The lack of foresight and inability to provide clear direction resulted in delays”) lacks even an implied actor. Those hearing or reading it—maybe even those thinking it—are left to guess who is lacking foresight and failing to provide clear direction.
Compare the first example with, “we need to rethink our system and correct it” and the second with, “the foreman failed to foresee problems and direct his crew accordingly.” Clear statements of who is doing what are not only more active but also more interesting. Humans pay a lot of attention to motion and action. We had to in order to survive in the wild among predators, and we would do well to maintain this heightened awareness in our thought and communication. On the other hand, we have only so much bandwidth at the level of conscious awareness, and we can hold in mind only a relatively small number of ideas or mental units at a given time. Hence our preference for stories, which present ideas through characters and actions, instead of dense, abstract treatises, which require us to exert far more mental effort to track what the writer is saying.
When we inject nominalizations into our thinking and writing, we replace people and actions with static nouns and staid verbs, sapping the vitality of our speech and prose. That’s why writing expert Helen Sword describes nominalizations as “zombie nouns.”4 In her video for TedEd, she humorously illustrates the life-sucking tendency of nominalizations—by loading a sentence full of them: “The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.” That’s the sort of sentence that academics and lawyers beat us over the head with. In fact, they do it so often that many people associate the bizarre jargon of “academese” with importance and intelligence, proceeding to nominalize their own language. Not good. As Sword points out, the sentence above “contains no fewer than seven nominalizations, yet it fails to tell us who is doing what.” Contrast it with: “Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract.” Amen.
When we use nominalizations, we zombify our thinking and communication, draining their lifeblood and scaring away those we aim to reach. Moreover, we may fail to clearly grasp, ourselves, who is doing what, which can have real consequences for how we conduct our lives.
Let’s look at one more impediment to clear thought and communication, a close relative to the zombie noun that I call the “ghost noun.”
Ghost Nouns
Ghost nouns are abstract concepts, disembodied “things” that, nonetheless, take actions—or so we are told. Consider how scholars of the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant often talk about how Kant’s system divides the world into two realms, the phenomenal world of appearance and the noumenal realm of “things in themselves.”
Can an abstract system of thought really divide the world into two realms, as many philosophers claim? Giving agency to abstract notions is a common manner of speaking, no doubt, but did Kant actually find the right words to somehow tear apart the fabric of the universe? That would be cause for concern. Perhaps, if philosophers had such power, we wouldn’t leave them alone in their ivory towers but would put them to work producing superhero films.
A more modest (or at least more accurate) philosopher, David Stove, drew attention to the problem of “success words.” In this case, “divides” is a success word: We’re told that a system of ideas successfully divided the world into two realms. That, of course, is not true. In fact, what Kant did, as Stove put it, was make “the biggest, though also the simplest, bluff ever tried.”5 He supposed—without evidence—that the world is cut in two, and many a philosopher thereafter accepted the bluff. Kant claimed the world is cut in two; his system did not actually cut it in two, nor did he perceive or identify some fundamental cleavage in the universe. These, too, are success words, and Kant was successful only in propagating a baseless hypothesis.
As Stove makes clear, we shouldn’t throw around success words without regard to the truth. But a more general principle is that we ought to be particularly careful about ascribing actions to things that cannot act. A system of thought cannot take any actions, never mind world-splitting ones. Similarly, Kant’s heirs, the postmodernists, tell us that “language constructs reality.”6 We know, of course, that language enables us humans to grasp facts and communicate arguments that may change a person’s mind. But language alone cannot construct the simplest of Lego sets.
If we want to think and communicate clearly, we ought not to ascribe actions to things that cannot act. We might occasionally deal in flourish and metaphor, saying such things as “justice demands that we regard a man as innocent until proven guilty” when what we mean is that “people concerned with justice must regard an accused man as innocent until proven guilty.” But we cross over into fantasy and obscurity when we say, as Karl Marx did, that “political economy knows the worker only as a working animal—as a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs,” or as Jordan Peterson did (ironically, in a chapter titled “Be Precise in Your Speech”), that “when error announces itself, undifferentiated chaos is at hand.”7 What Marx meant is that some political economists misconstrue man merely as a working animal. What Peterson meant is anyone’s guess (perhaps that making one big mistake leads us to question everything?).
Hearing ghost nouns ought to raise red flags in our minds. Whenever we come across writing or speech claiming that an abstract thing or idea is doing something in the world, that is cause for slowing down and really thinking about the truth of the matter. If we’re thinking in terms of ghost nouns, it’s likely we’re not really clear about who is doing what.
The Principle: Who Is Doing What
If we reflect on all the examples of unclear communication that we’ve looked at, we can pinpoint a commonality: They don’t clearly tell us who is doing what. “A decision was made,” and “temperatures have been observed to be rising”: Well, who made the decision, and who made these observations? “The necessity to rethink our system in order to correct it is evident”: Evident to whom? “The lack of foresight and inability to provide clear direction resulted in delays”: Whose lack of foresight? And then with the examples from Kant, postmodernists, Marx, and Peterson, we’re told that abstract notions are taking actions that, in fact, they cannot take. Where are the actors, and what are they actually doing?
The overarching principle—which heightens our awareness to passive voice, zombie nouns, and ghost nouns—is always to be clear about who is doing what. If we give ourselves the standing order to answer this question—whether we’re thinking through something for ourselves or trying to communicate with others—it will prompt us to dig deeper into the nature of what we’re trying to grasp, ask more questions, and achieve greater clarity. We’ll think more clearly about how things actually work, because we live in a world of agents taking actions.
We don’t live in a world where agency is absent. We don’t live in a world where there can be “a lack of foresight” or an “inability to provide clear directions” without someone being responsible. We don’t live in a world of disembodied necessities “to rethink our system in order to correct it.” We don’t live in a world constructed or divided by language. But the way people use words can make us think otherwise.
So, give yourself the standing order always to be clear about who is doing what. Once you flip this switch in your mind and activate your awareness to these sorts of communication faux pas, everywhere you look, you’ll start seeing people using passive voice, zombie nouns, and ghost nouns. And, by thinking through what these people—and you yourself—actually mean, you’ll achieve a new level of conceptual clarity, the positive effects of which will reverberate throughout your life.